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FBI Memorandum from an unidentified agent regarding the investigation of the Alien Enemy Control Program, April 23, 1958

Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi (1918-2012) was an American sociologist and conscientious objector to the Japanese American internment during WWII. Born in the Sand Point area of Seattle, he grew up on the farmland surrounding Kent. In Japan, both of Hirabayashi's parents had become members of Mukyokai, or the "non-church" movement. Teaching Christian principles free from denominational issues, Mukyokai stressed an uncompromising stand against social injustice. When he was a student at the University of Washington, Hirabayashi became a Quaker and involved in social services. Hirabayashi refused to comply with the curfew imposed on Japanese Americans in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later refused to report for relocation to the internment camps on the grounds that the directives were based solely on race and therefore were unconstitutional.
After the last Japanese were forcibly removed from Seattle, Hirabayashi turned himself in to the FBI and was tried and convicted in the Federal District Court of Seattle. The case ultimately went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the curfew was constitutional. Hirabayashi was sentenced to serve three months in a minimum security prison in Arizona. No funds were available to transport him, so Hirabayashi spent two weeks hitchhiking to get there. Later, he was tried and convicted of draft resistance and served nine months in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island. When released, Hirabayashi returned to the University of Washington and received BA, MA and PhD degrees in sociology. Upon completeion of his education, he taught overseas at the American University in Beirut and the American University at Cairo. He retired from the University of Alberta in 1983. In the 1980s Hirabayashi and his legal team brought new evidence about the exclusion order's prejudice to the courts of government misconduct which then overturned his 1943 convictions based on the rarely used argument of coram nobis. In May 2012, four months after his death, Hirabayashi was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.